This novel is Թեկնածուն, or The Candidate, by Zareh Vorpouni, a French-Armenian writer whose transgressive, experimental novels spurned the insularity of Western Armenian literature. In so doing, he stitched the hybridity of the diasporan condition into the very fabric of his novels like few Armenian writers before or after him. His distinction lies in his integration of mid-twentieth-century French literary trends in an attempt to prompt a metamorphosis of Western Armenian literature and encourage a dramatic cultural shift.
In the case of The Candidate, published in 1967 and translated into English in 2016, the avant-garde of French literature was centered around the nouveau roman, or the new novel, which Vorpouni adapted to comment on what he saw as a cultural ill that permeated Armenian diasporan life. By drawing on elements of the nouveau roman, he did something bold. He called into question the constructed nature of survivor testimonies of the Armenian genocide and the cultural discourse surrounding trauma in the Armenian diaspora.
By the time Vorpouni’s novel was published, over half a century had passed since the onset of the Armenian genocide in 1915. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Armenians had fled the Ottoman Empire and settled into new lives across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. The trauma of genocidal violence and deracination largely silenced the first generation of survivors, who stifled memories of their pasts as they worked to rebuild their lives. But by the 1960s, a new generation of diasporan-born Armenians had come of age and had begun to demand international recognition for the violence committed against their parents. Their activism relied heavily on their parents’ survivor accounts to legitimize their demands and prove to an indifferent public the death and destruction the genocide had caused. It is the boundary between reality and fiction in these survivor accounts that Zareh Vorpouni explores in his novel.
But who was this writer who devoted his life to Armenian literature yet never managed to break into its canon? He was born Zareh Euksuzian in the Ottoman town of Ordu on the Black Sea in 1902. His ordinary childhood was interrupted in 1915 when news of massacres arrived. Spared the death march, the young writer managed to cross the Black Sea with his family and arrive in Crimea in 1918. Sixteen-year-old Zareh was soon apprenticed to a shoemaker and, as a struggling writer later in life, would reminisce about this period, wishing he had the stable life that came from mastering a trade.
In 1919, when the Bolsheviks entered Crimea, young Zareh and his family fled once again—this time to Constantinople. Here, Vorpouni was at the center of a burgeoning Armenian literary life, which led to brushes with literary figures that would set him on a course toward writing: his lifelong joy and torment. In post-genocide Constantinople, Western Armenian literature was teetering on the brink of death and the surviving Ottoman Armenian elite worked to create a generation of young men with the language skills and cultural consciousness needed to continue the literary tradition well into the future. Vorpouni was among these young men.
But this atmosphere of promise and social renewal did not last for very long. In 1922, Vorpouni fled the city along with the majority of its Armenian population and arrived in France, a country that would see his writing develop, veer, stall, and ultimately mature.
In the early 1930s, Vorpouni belonged to a group of young writers who congregated in Paris, the center of Western Armenian intellectual life between the world wars, around a literary journal called Մենք (Us). The group was comprised of Armenians who had fled Constantinople for Paris and brought about a brief cultural revival that focused on the development of the novel and the examination of diasporan identities in literature.
Vorpouni and his peers deliberately broke with their predecessors in theme and form, staging an outright rebellion. Their impulse to represent the new realities of the diaspora challenged the conservatism of the Armenian community, creating a fleeting period in which brazen interrogations of nationalism, clericalism, and sexuality became the norm in literature.
While most of his peers lost their momentum after World War II, Vorpouni spent the second half of the twentieth century at the height of his creativity. His writing spurt in the 1960s and 1970s, however, coincided with the decline of his language of choice: Western Armenian. With Armenian-language education limited, the diaspora was quickly losing its ability—and its inclination—to read fiction in Western Armenian. As a result, Vorpouni’s novels were read only by a dwindling number of literary-minded readers concentrated in the intellectual centers of Beirut, Istanbul, and Paris.
In 1929, at the age of twenty-seven, Vorpouni published Փորձը (The Attempt), the first in a series of seven novels that would take an entire lifetime to write and still be left unfinished. The series, Հալածուածները (The Persecuted), was conceived as a way to tell the story of Armenian refugees in France in the 1920s. Many other writers of his time wrote on the same theme, but Vorpouni did not see his writing as inhabiting the same realm. For him, their realm, which he called the “Armenian ghetto,” was defined by a narrow-mindedness that refused to look outward at the wider world. He wrote that he had no use for writers fixated on banal themes like loss and nostalgia, and sought to write literature that was of the same intellectual rigor and literary caliber as what he was reading outside the Armenian ghetto.
The Candidate is the second novel in this series, published thirty-eight years after the first. In the intervening years, Vorpouni briefly renounced Armenian for French; lived as a German prisoner of war for five years; and worked as a night guard in Paris, where, so he says, he wrote The Candidate feverishly over the course of forty nights.
The novel opens in 1927 in Paris after Minas, the protagonist, has found his friend Vahakn’s body on the floor of the apartment they share. In a fragmentary way, with cracks in time within the narrative, Minas tells of his meeting Vahakn in the cafés of the Latin Quarter; the friendship that joins them; their conversations with Ziya, a young Turkish student in Paris; Vahakn’s murder of Ziya; and Vahakn’s subsequent suicide.
At the core of the novel is the letter that Vahakn leaves Minas to explain the enigma of Ziya’s murder and his own suicide. The letter recounts Vahakn and his mother’s deportation from their village in the Ottoman Empire, Vahakn’s adoption by a Turkish woman who rapes and abuses him, his feelings of alienation and self-estrangement in France, and his inability to adapt to life after the murder.
Throughout the novel, we assume that we are reading Minas’s notes, but the structure of the novel is complicated when Minas suddenly refers to a figure named Zareh at the end of the book. We soon discover that what we have read is the draft of a manuscript that Minas is sending to Zareh Vorpouni to turn into a novel.
Only here, at the very end of the book, does the plot come into focus: Vahakn kills himself but leaves an account explaining his act. Minas inherits the account from Vahakn, while also inheriting the drive to save it from oblivion and give it a semi-literary existence. Minas then calls on Vorpouni to put his notes in order and publish them. Here is our first glimpse of Vorpouni’s suspicion about the full veracity of survivor testimonies. Only here, by emphasizing the fictionalizing qualities of memory, does Vorpouni begin to show us his conceptualization of survivor accounts as a literary form rather than an incontrovertible reality.
For him, the novel is a tool that uncovers what has remained hidden in survivor accounts. By making Vahakn’s account into an object to be crafted, revised, and rewritten, Vorpouni examines the intimate, conflicting relationship between the novelistic narrative and the survivor narrative. In so doing, he asks readers to do something practically sacrilegious: he asks them to reflect on the possible constructed elements of their parents’ and grandparents’ accounts of genocide and accept that these hallowed stories may be, in part, works of fiction.
To lead his readers to this realization, Vorpouni draws on the theory of the nouveau roman for the freedom to play with subjectivity, time, and linearity.
The concept of the nouveau roman was developed in the late 1950s to describe the work of French writers who experimented with the structure of the novel and offered an alternative to literary realism. One of the pioneers of this movement was Alain Robbe-Grillet, who described the nouveau roman as
a convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel, forms capable of expressing (or creating) new relations between man and the world and the man of tomorrow. Such writers know that the systematic repetition of the forms of the past is not only absurd and futile, but that it can even become harmful: by blinding us to our real situation in the world today, it keeps us ultimately from constructing the world and man of tomorrow.In addition to this interest in forging a new relationship with the past, the nouveau roman is also defined by its nonlinear plot, designed to structurally symbolize the absence of order, coherence, and stability in an indecipherable world. Also inherent in the structure of the novel is a self-referential commentary on the construction of the novel itself. The new novelist does away with literary conventions to reveal the mechanics of novel-writing and shine a spotlight on the writer’s own self-conscious process of composition. This self-consciousness is heightened by another technique used by new novelists—a device called mise en abyme, or the creation of stories within stories to disorient the reader into questioning the boundaries that separate reality from fiction.
With The Candidate, Vorpouni strives to do just this. In an interview before the book’s release, he revealed his unlikely goal for his novel: to disorient the Armenian reader, first and foremost. In a world filled with trauma and violence, why pretend, he might say, that there is any semblance of order or coherence through a chronological narrative?
The main disorienting elements of the novel are folded into the two letters that anchor the narrative. They both explicitly comment on the ease with which memory can create fiction and yet be presented as truth. In one of the most evocative passages in the novel, Vahakn ends his suicide note by hinting at the blurred lines between the real and the imagined:
Everyone thinks their lives are novels filled with hardship. Many times people have told me their life story, after which they stop, let out a long sigh, and say, “Ah, my whole life is a novel.” It’s a novel not by virtue of what we have lived but by virtue of how we narrate it. I’ve noticed that at least half of each story is a lie. Since every life is incomplete, the imagination completes the incomplete with fiction. So, life is a tragedy. Life is like dough thrown onto the world. We complete nature’s unfinished work by kneading, shaping, and molding our own piece of dough. I’m afraid that I too have fallen prey to my own imagination, so here I end the rough draft of my novel and sign it in blood.This is how Vahakn ends his harrowing survivor story, by warning readers that everything they have just read should be doubted, that his memories should be read not as an eyewitness account, as the whole truth, but rather as fiction, as a novel. In so doing, he calls into question the authenticity of texts like his as historical accounts; he calls into question the genre of survivor testimony.
With his novel, Vorpouni veers into uncharted territory by using experimental literature to comment on a tired trope in Armenian diasporan culture: the national obsession with proving death. This obsession manifests itself in a cultural fixation on the Armenian genocide and on politicized campaigns for its recognition by governments around the world. Vorpouni undermines this hallmark of the diaspora by exposing the survivor stories used in these campaigns as unreliable. But he does not leave his readers to fret in the disorientation he has created. Instead of as truth, he asks readers to look at these stories as pieces of art that prompt reflection in another way. In For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet writes: “the function of art is never to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring into the world certain interrogations (and also, perhaps, in time, certain answers) not yet known as such to themselves.”
At the end of the novel, Minas writes a letter to Zareh, which seems to address the readers as well, prodding them toward seeing testimony as art: “I’m sending you my manuscript. You can finish the work however you like . . . There are still so many things that I couldn’t squeeze in anywhere or introduce any kind of inner logic to without upsetting the rules and standards. So many precious fragments of life are lost when you try to turn reality into art.”
With this idea, Vorpouni not only challenges the sanctity of survivor testimonies as they had come to be seen, but treats them as just another text subject to revision and modification based on the whims of memory, the meandering course of thought, and the stylistics of the writer.
In the end, what was the point of Vorpouni’s literary alchemy? What did his Armenian nouveau roman seek to impart to its readers? Ultimately Vorpouni was interested in the cultural advancement of his people, whom he saw as having stagnated. If, as Robbe-Grillet theorized for the French context, the nouveau roman was intended to encourage the emergence of the man of tomorrow and his new relations with the world around him, The Candidate can be seen as wishing into existence the Armenian of tomorrow, who rather than accepting the past as an object to be venerated uncritically, has the ability to see it in all of its possible nuance. Only once the past can be seen in this way, only once people can chip away at cultural taboos might Vorpouni’s Armenian of tomorrow come into being.
